I’m not sure what to do with the 30gb of video files now that the contest is over. Someone requested a HQ version on the forums, so i’ll post it up here :]
モーニング娘。3,2,1 Breakin’ Out! [OPV Splash Ver] HQ – 61mb (.mp4)
(‘Right click and Save as’)
For those of you who are interested, here’s a rather lengthy summary of how the OPV was made. I guess it’ll be nice to look back at this entry a year later and go… ahhh i did that. xD
A little background
When I first saw the news on H!P that they were running this competition, I immediately went, OMG why didn’t I major video editing in school! :X
I had some basic knowledge of Premiere and how to cut things, but that wasn’t going to be enough I thought. Like most people, the first idea that came to my mind was to do some sort of hip-hop graffiti-styled video. Of course the first few submitted videos that showed up were graffiti-styled ones. So that was it for that idea. Went to do some research, watching other music videos, trying to see how they were done and at the same time, looked around for an idea I could use.
The first cut = epic fail
To start off I watch every green screen clip that was provided, and noted the timing of those that I wanted to use. I put slapped a rough cut in Premiere and… it was horrible. Lol. I thought ok, something is seriously missing here. Then I went back to look at some videos, taking special note of how and where they cut their clips. I learnt the most from Goto Maki’s ‘Fly away’ and Wondergirl’s ‘Nobody but you’.
If you watched the videos and just focused on the editing, you’ll find they add in seemingly random cuts everywhere, some cuts less than a split second even. Slow cuts at fast parts of the music, fast cuts at slow parts of the music. It was at this point that I realized editing wasn’t as simple as I thought it would be. This post on the H!O forum was very enlightening to me, and everything started to make sense.
Splatter inspiration
For the paint splash background idea, I got inspired from Aly & AJ’s ‘Potential Breakup’ video. I had no idea how to do that kind of flowy splatter effect, but was determined to do something similar. At this point I was done with my basic background, and there were already a ton of submitted videos. I was wondering how in the world was I to make mine any different?
Judges expectations and a tiny discovery
I got stuck for a while and started to wonder what the judges wanted to see? Once again this post on the forums summed it up nicely i think. But now we know it wasn’t the case in how they picked the final winners xD
At this point I went back to look at previous Morning Musume PVs, trying to decipher what they might be looking for. The first one I looked at was Mikan, seeing as it too, was a green screen production. But it was in the Shoganai Yume Oibito’s dance shot that I realized the camera was constantly moving front and back, regardless of the song. It’s the same shot throughout, but there was movement so it wasn’t boring. I felt this subtle movement made everything feel really dynamic. Plus none of the submitted videos had moving cameras yet, so I thought ok, let’s move cameras!
Moving cameras = frustration
I went through a lot frustration trying to figure out HOW to do the camera movements in After Effects. But i got the hang of it after a several nights. From then on I started to think about the video as a scene with a camera moving in 3D space, instead of just a flat video. That led to the idea of the rising colored bars just before the chorus, which i thought complemented their hands up motion and ‘ahhhhhh’ vocals. I felt it picked up the energy again after the background got boring.
More colors! More oomph!
It was at this point that I went back to add in their official colors for the close up shots, so they tied in with this new colored bar sequence. For the chorus I knew I wanted to have the huge 3, 2, 1 words to appear as they jumped, but it was sorely lacking in any sort of impact. Watching Aly & Aj’s Chemicals React gave me the camera shake and glowing lights idea.
Panic = Inspiration
Then around this time Lem sama posted this video, and I was like, OMG that’s it. I’m doomed!Was panicking a bit before i came across this GAP advertisement, which I thought was mighty impressive. But I had zero drawing skills, and no idea how to do something like that. So I got stuck on that for a while. I was mulling over the provided jump sequences of the girls and staring at the background i made, when i wondered, why not just use the brush strokes to accent their jumps? It’ll look like the girls are splattering paint all over. It matches the background too?
Man this is tedious work
The next 5 days was spent trying to do the splatter sequences for each of the girl’s jump. The first one I did was Reina. I took like 4 hours just to get it the way I wanted it to look. I did some math, 4 hours = 1 girl, 4 hours x the remaining 8 girls = 32 hours holy crap.
I wanted to do it only for the 5th and 6th gen girls since it was such an insanely tedious process. But I imagined Koharu saying something like, “Hey where’s my sequence? So unfair!” … then I just sucked it up and continued the process for all the girls. But the process got faster after each girl as I found better ways to recreate the effect. The last sequence took me about 30 mins. This was where I missed the submission for the last viewing, the one with Risa, Mitsui and Koharu here :(
The final stretch
I doubt there was going to be any more viewings on dohhhup, so I spent the last 2 weeks re-touching the close-up shot backgrounds and tweaking the editing. Wanted to make sure everyone had enough screen time. I didn’t want any parts of the video to get boring, as I’d imagine the judges would have seen the same ai-chan sing for the 968th time. 1 week before the deadline, my After Effects and Premier trial expired, and that was it.
Conclusion!
I went through a whole lot of frustration on the technical side, mostly because i didn’t know how to create a certain effect or look, or when a great submission just got posted, and i would get discouraged a bit.
But one thing I liked from the whole process was the constructive support everyone has on the H!O forums here. It’s great to be part of such a supportive community, and it’s also encouraging to see the amount of support in terms of submissions from fans outside of Japan. Wonder when they’ll do another such competition? xD
Man i think this is one of the longest post i’ve ever typed. Shall stop here ^-^
